Its been 10 years since the iPhone was first introduced to the world in 2007. Steve Jobs had the vision to shape our digital landscape, but with the renegade smartphone’s brazen ideas and expensive price tag, critics didn’t let it stroll into our lives without a frown or two.

The current Microsoft Chief Executive, Steve Ballmer, condemned the iPhone saying there’s no chance it would gain any significant market share. TechCrunch said the product would bomb and heavily criticised the keyboard (although they were right about the cracked screens!) Even the co-chief executive of BlackBerry at the time, Jim Balsillie, claimed that the iPhone wasn’t a ‘sea-change’. How did so many thought leaders in the tech space get it wrong? How did Apple manage to overturn the market dominance of Blackberry, Nokia and countless others? Here are 5 iPhone features that helped silence the naysayers, helping Apple to become one of the world’s most revered brands in the world today.

1. Threaded text messages

Before the iPhone shocked the world text messages were stored as separate files. You would constantly have to move back and forth between messages to look through the conversation.

The iPhone’s threaded message interface changed everything by making it easy to see your entire conversation just by scrolling. It’s a beautiful game-changing feature that has inspired the likes of Whatsapp, Snapchat and many others.

2. Keyboardless design

Without a doubt, one of the most revolutionary ideas has to be the smartphone that doesn’t have a physical keyboard. The thought of handling emails, using the internet and even editing professional documents on a phone without a keyboard was one of the main sticking points certain critics had with Apple’s phone.

Some smartphone devices went for the stylus pen whilst Blackberry’s strategy was to hold fire on a device with a tiny built-in keyboard, which proved to be the company’s most costly blunder, as their market share began to dwindle shortly after Apple entered the market.

3. Apps

The word “apps” was rarely used before the iPhone, but the ability to customise your device has proven to be invaluable to both Apple and the smart device industry as a whole.

This year, it is estimated that over 268 billion downloads will help in generating over £63 billion worth of revenue. It was Apple that believed in the concept as they were lightyears ahead of their rivals at the time.

4. Pinch and zoom

The biggest problem phone users had before the iPhone was that the screen size felt too small to do anything.

A full-length touchscreen is the type of feature we take for granted today, but Apple was the first to tackle the pinch and zoom problem by focusing their entire user experience efforts on simplicity and ease of use.

5. Combining revolutionary ideas

When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone in 2007 he spoke about how their phone was three ground-breaking ideas rolled into one device. It was a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone and a breakthrough internet communications device.

Combining these ideas took years of research and development. In fact, the Apple phone was first conceptualised as far back as 1983. The result is a phone that dominates the hearts and minds of many smartphone users today.

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